Editorials
“The X-Files” Turns 25: The 10 Best Monster of the Week Episodes!
Premiering on Fox on September 10, 1993, Chris Carter’s television blurred the lines between sci-fi, drama, mystery, thriller, and horror and quickly rose from cult hit to one of the most influential TV series of all time. The series revolved around FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who investigate the X-files, or unsolved cases involving the paranormal. Mulder is a firm believer, while his more scientifically minded partner is a skeptic, a dynamic that drives each episode’s investigation into the weird.
While there’s an overlying series’ spanning story arc involving extraterrestrials and conspiracies, the monster of the week episodes that made up most of the series was an absolute highlight. Drawing inspiration from older series like Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Night Gallery, and The Twilight Zone, tuning in to watch what weird phenomena Scully and Mulder would discover next was a blast. Sometimes, it was downright creepy. From Satanic witches to monstrous humanoids, there was no aspect of the paranormal left uncovered in the X-files. Even scarier was that the terrifying entities often escaped the episode, leaving them still out there lurking. In celebration of the 25th anniversary of this acclaimed series, we look back at the 10 creepiest monster of the week episodes.
“Humbug” – Season 2, episode 20
This episode feels straight from Tales from the Crypt and earned a nomination for an Edgar Award. Scully and Mulder head to Gibsonton, Florida to investigate a series of attacks on former circus sideshow performers after a death in the community. Twin Peaks regular Michael J. Anderson is the trailer park manager, and Vincent Schiavelli is an alcoholic with a tumor-like conjoined twin named Leonard. The episode plays around with the concept of the Fiji mermaid, but of course, the true killer is something far creepier. And predictable if you’re familiar with Tales from the Crypt. In keeping with the theme, this episode ends on a darkly humorous note.
“The Host” – Season 2, episode 2
If you weren’t already wary of Porta Potties, this episode will ensure you’ll steer clear in the future. This ep’s monster takes the concept of the parasitic flukeworm and turns it into a humanoid monster that lives in the sewer. The monster’s design, pale and slimy with a fluke mouth, is terrifying enough, but the reveal of what its bite can bring is pure icky body horror. One victim complains of a foul taste in his mouth after surviving an attack, but it’s nothing compared to his vomiting up a flukeworm hours later.
“Badlaa” – Season 8, episode 10
The opening scene in this ep has a large businessman dismissing a paraplegic beggar at the Mumbai, India airport, something he almost instantly comes to regret when the beggar violently pulls him out of the bathroom stall a short while later. Cut to the businessman checking into his hotel in Washington D.C., then bleeding out profusely on the hotel bed. The beggar is revealed to be a mystic inspired by stories of revenge-seeking Indian fakirs. This beggar is out for blood, and that he literally hitches a ride inside someone’s body to make his way overseas is chilling.
“War of the Coprophages” – Season 3, episode 12
Look. Cockroaches are scary. So, this episode already had an advantage toward spine-chilling. But then, of course, The X-Files takes it a step further by making these roaches dung eating extraterrestrial robotic probes with a penchant for swarming and killing. As if that’s not bad enough, there’s a skin-crawling scene that sees a roach burrow into an open wound of a teen. He freaks out and tries to cut it out of his skin, resulting in a bloody death. Director Kim Manners also plays a mean trick on the audience by having a roach scurry across the screen, making you question if your own home has been invaded.
“Squeeze” – Season 1, episode 3
The mystery at the heart of this episode sees Scully and Mulder investigate a series of brutal murders that seem to reoccur every 30 years. What they eventually find is Eugene Victor Tooms (Doug Hutchison), a mutant that feeds off human livers before going into hibernation for 30 years. He also has the ability to squeeze into tight places, making him hard to track without obvious points of entry in the victims’ homes. The weird hibernation nests that Tooms makes, bound together by his bile, is icky enough, but it’s Hutchison’s unnerving performance that makes Tooms an all-time creepy villain. The character returns in episode 21.
“Chinga” – Season 5, episode 10
Co-written by Stephen King, Chinga featured Scully on vacation in Maine, only to find herself drawn into the mysterious case of a creepy girl and her creepier doll when she stumbles upon a grocery store full of bloodied victims of self-mutilation. The girl’s mother lives in fear and is plagued with visions of the next victim to fall prey to the girl and her evil doll. Mulder sticks to the sidelines in this ep, leaving Scully to contend with a nightmarish killer doll on her own.
“Sanguinarium” – Season 4, episode 6
The cold open is one gnarly, gruesome foray into plastic surgery gone wrong, instilling or reinforcing the fear of being put under the knife. From there, Scully and Mulder are called in to investigate as the doctor had no recollection of killing his patient. It’s the first of many botched surgeries resulting in horrific deaths, but when Mulder finds pentagrams he suspects witchcraft. Any episode in which The X-files dabbled in black magic, Satanism, and witchcraft (see the next two entries) is a creepy delight, and this gruesome plastic surgery-themed ep is among the best. Slurpy wet sounds and all.
“Die Hand Die Verletzt” – Season 2, episode 14
When teens go into the woods to play with black magic, one doesn’t come back out alive. Enter Scully and Mulder, who find the faculty of the local high school aren’t the conservatives they appear to be, but Satanic worshippers that don’t realize they’re in over their heads. If you’re afraid of snakes, then this episode’s death by snake will deliver nightmare fuel. Even still, it’s nothing compared to the nightmare that is substitute teacher Mrs. Phyllis Paddock (Susan Blommaert).
“Familiar” – Season 11, Episode 8
Two words: Mr. Chuckleteeth. With an opening feeling very familiar to It, right down to a raincoat sporting little boy wandering off alone to his violent demise, Mr. Chuckleteeth instills himself as one of the more terrifying entities of the series. He’s not the only terrifying kid’s show character to terrorize, as a demonic Teletubbies copycat also makes an appearance, but he is the most iconic. Of course, the true villain is an evil force summoned by way of witchcraft, unleashing hellhounds, spirits, and evil that’s not quite quelled by episode end.
“Home” – Season 4, episode 2
A darkly satiric look at the traditional family values of America, Home is easily one of the most twisted hours of television. Opening with the live burying of a newborn baby in the middle of a storm, only for its bloody corpse to be discovered by a group of boys playing baseball, this was the first episode to issue a viewer discretion warning for graphic content for the series. The Peacock family feel related to the pack from The Hills Have Eyes. Scully and Mulder plot to save the mother of the dead baby, believing her to be held captive by the deformed Peacock brothers, but the reveal is much, much worse; the woman is the limbless, deformed Peacock matriarch that prefers to reside under the bed. Once seen, the imagery will never leave your head.
The great Ernest Dickerson turns seventy-five years old this month, so we’re looking back at his most memorable contribution to the horror genre – 1995’s Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight!
The film hit screens while the Tales from the Crypt series was winding down its run on television, and it stands apart with a story that feels a step or two removed from the franchise norm. That was the smart play, though, as the show’s stories – and those from the original EC comics – work best in short bites. The result is a film that holds up beautifully as a gory good time.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995)
Commentator: Ernest Dickerson (director), Michael Felsher (moderator)
1. Dickerson was in post-production on Surviving the Game when he got a call from his agent saying that producer Gil Adler wanted to meet about a Tales from the Crypt feature film. It went well, so Dickerson met with Joel Silver next and secured the job.
2. The original screenplay for the film came to the producers as a spec script wholly detached from the Tales from the Crypt brand. They added the Crypt Keeper (voiced by John Kassir) bookends to make it fit.
3. Dickerson was more familiar with the original EC comic books having read them as a kid, but he had watched a few episodes of the HBO series, so he knew what the current vibe was for the project.
4. Adler directed the film’s wraparound segments, meaning Dickerson never actually got to work with the creepy puppet. “Gil and the Crypt Keeper had a great relationship,” he adds, “they worked together for years.”
5. While he was new to the Tales from the Crypt family, Dickerson had previously worked as a director of photography on the Tales from the Darkside anthology series. That show is underappreciated in my humble opinion, and I will go to bat for both it and the equally underloved Monsters.
6. A big appeal of the horror genre for Dickerson is the idea of dark mysteries that challenge our imagination. For this film, that came down to the mythology being created between the characters.
7. Five executive producers are listed in the opening credits, but Dickerson says the only two he had dealings with were Silver and Richard Donner. The other three were Walter Hill, Robert Zemeckis, and David Giler.
8. Dickerson had only ever seen Billy Zane in movies with a full head of hair, so he was surprised when Zane showed up on the first day with a bald head. “He had this case, and he opened up the case that he had all these hair pieces in, and he says, ‘So which one of these do you think I should use?’” Dickerson looked at him and suggested he just go bald for the character.
9. While the bulk of the opening exteriors were filmed in a desert just outside Los Angeles, the shot of the old church at 11:26 was created on a warehouse hangar soundstage where the film’s interiors were shot.
10. When he had read the script, Dickerson pictured the character of Jeryline (Jada Pinkett Smith) “as a little, tough lady.” He had recently seen Smith in Menace II Society, and while the producers had someone else in mind for the role, he fought to get her instead.
11. Just as Zane surprised Dickerson with his hair (or lack thereof), Smith arrived on the first day with her hair dyed platinum white. He “liked the idea” but asked her to please get it tweaked so it looked more yellowish blond. “It’s definitely a statement.”
12. He had seen Brenda Bakke in the 1989 sci-fi/action film from Japan, Gunhed, and thought she’d be great here as Cordelia. The rest of us might recognize her from Death Spa or Trucks.
13. Felsher comments that the film’s setup does a good job not telegraphing who’s going to live or die, and he uses the “nice guy” (Charles Fleischer) and “the kid” (Ryan O’Donohue) as examples. “You don’t play by those rules here,” he says, and Dickerson replies that he wanted to subvert those rules. That extends to Smith as well because she’s Black, “and usually in movies like this they’re the first folks to die.”
14. Dickerson says they had forty days of filming, “which, the way I’m used to working, was a very generous schedule.” It was budgeted at around $10 million.
15. This probably won’t surprise you, but Zane improvised the bit at 26:25 after he jumps out the window and says, “Fuck this cowboy shit! You fuckin’, hodunk Podunk, well, then, motherfuckers!”
16. In the original script, the demons that The Collector (Zane) raises from the dirt actually looked more like the people they used to be. “They were more human,” but the very smart decision was made in pre-production to make them look far more unique instead.
17. The demons are killed by shooting their eyes, but Dickerson felt there should be one more element to it. “Shoot out their eyes, you gotta duck because the souls come shooting out, and if it hits ya, boom, it can kill ya.” This is a fun touch.
18. He’s been asked more than once if these demons are where Peter Jackson got the idea for how the orcs would look in his Lord of the Rings movies. “They do look like orcs.”
19. He recalls having seen Ronny Yu’s The Bride with White Hair shortly before going to work on Demon Knight, and he hoped to bring some of that staged style into his own film. An example of that in practice is Brayker’s (William Sadler) brief flashbacks to Christ on the cross.
20. Character deaths were mostly based on the idea that “each person’s downfall was going to be predicated by their weakness.” The Collector discovers someone’s weakness and then uses it against them. Cordelia wants to be loved, Jeryline wants to travel, Uncle Willy (Dick Miller) is a horndog for both liquor and ladies, Danny loves horror comics, etc.
21. Dickerson says that plenty of genre classics were in the back of his head while making the film, including Assault on Precinct 13, Alien, Aliens, and more.
22. Cordelia is possessed into a demonic form, and Dickerson’s idea for how she’d look was originally a bit different. “Since Cordelia was a prostitute, I thought that her mouth should actually be a vertical slit that was in her stomach… which would open up with teeth and a tongue.” It was nixed, he says, when “the wife of one of the producers read that and said ‘no way you’re putting that in the movie.’”
23. The key makes an appearance in the followup, Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood, but it wasn’t originally meant to. Apparently, early test audiences expected it to be a more connected sequel to Demon Knight, so the filmmakers added it in to appease them. This is where I go on record saying that Bordello of Blood is a fun time. Can’t touch Demon Knight, obviously, but it’s more entertaining than its reputation suggests.
24. They had to film Uncle Willy’s bar scene “dream” twice, once with the women topless and once with them in bikinis, to have versions for both theaters and television broadcast. “Dick’s a pro.” (To be fair, Dickerson says this in regard to Miller having to endure the makeup application, but the sentiment fits both situations, so…)
25. Dickerson says he’s “always amazed at the love that people show this film,” and adds that fans bring it up to him incredibly often. This is great to hear, as we should always be telling artists how much their work means to us while they’re still alive and able to hear it.
26. Zane also suggested the gag at 1:08:21 with the sponge coming out of his mouth. The beat reminds Dickerson to praise the actor even more, adding that he was an “ally” to the director when “bad ideas” came down from the studio suits.
27. He didn’t get any pushback on killing little Danny. He did insist on one added element, though, as he wanted to immediately follow the boy exploding in the air with a shot of his bloody and torn sneaker hitting the ground below. “And the sneaker had to be a hightop.”
28. Dickerson says there’s “something kinky sexy about” Smith being covered in blood, and then the two commentators go quiet for almost two minutes out of respect for the scene. It’s a good opportunity to reflect on how Dickerson had previously mentioned Alien and Aliens as films being in the back of his head during filming, and how two scenes here reflect that – Jeryline stripping down to her underwear for the final confrontation feels like a nod to Ridley Scott’s film, while an earlier scene with Irene (CCH Pounder) and Dep. Bob (Gary Farmer) realizing they’re surrounded and choosing to blow themselves up alongside some of the demons is something of a callback to the air vent sacrifice in James Cameron’s film.
29. Asked about the film’s critical reception at the time of release, Dickerson says it received good reviews from horror-loving critics and then talks about the importance of horror in general. “Horror has always been a great way of putting out ideas, of talking about some of the things that affect us as people. Some of the best horror, like the best science fiction, talks about what it’s like to be human. Some of the best horror gets very political.”
30. The original ending would have featured The Collector showing “his true self, which is a demon made of fire.” They spent a lot of time trying to make it work, but it was “extremely difficult… back in the day of analog effects.” It was rewritten into the faceoff between him and Jeryline featuring the dancing, the crotch fire, Zane’s attempts at saying “love,” and his eventual demise from her bloody spit.
31. They both agree that a direct sequel to Demon Knight could be a lot of fun, but Dickerson says he’s unaware of any talk on the possibility.
32. Dickerson was super excited about this new Scream Factory Blu-ray in 2015, and he mentions that before its release, he had imported a Blu-ray from Germany presumably to enjoy the film in HD. He’s just like us! (Or am I the only one here who’s imported a German Blu-ray of the much maligned werewolf flick Big Bad Wolf…)
Quotes Without Context
“I was so happy to get Dick Miller for this movie.”
“There was a time when guys used to put ketchup on everything.”
“I’m a big student of Hitchcock, and the best way to make a moment of horror work is to lull the audience into a false sense of security.”
“A villain should always be the most interesting person in a movie.”
“They were a really great bunch of performers who were performing on these little leg-extension stilts wearing a diaper that had a radio-controlled tail that was being manipulated by a special effects tech right out of the frame.”
“It’s hard to direct air; it doesn’t do what you want.”
“The only censorship problem came from the producer’s wife, who didn’t want the vagina dentalis [sic] in the movie.”
“One of the executives wanted to know why the devil didn’t try to have sex with Jada.”
“It always starts with the script.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
You must be logged in to post a comment.